Limiting American Firepower

• Tweet

After publishing a piece over at OpinionStink about the state of American gun control and having another piece posted in retort, I wanted to take the time to reiterate my personal position here; given how simple the short-term solution is, and how many people are touting it, I figure I’d be wrong to not throw my (small) voice in with the chorus.

Whether or not events like that in Aurora, Colorado and Sandy Hook Elementary are the result of mental illness, false flag operations, or pure evil, the prevalence of military-style weaponry among the American populace is the real culprit behind the grisly scenes repeated across that country over and over again over the past decade.

Yes, guns do kill people – especially semi-automatic guns.

The Canadian Difference

Need a point of reference? We have crazy people here in Canada, too, but, thankfully, most of them don’t have access to an AR-15.

This past September, following a convincing electoral win for for the separatist Parti Québécois in Quebec, a mad man in a blue robe stormed into the building where party leader Pauline Marois was delivering her victory speech. While shouting “the English are rising” (in French, no less), the man proceeded to fire three shots from a rifle, killing one man and wounding another; Marois herself went unscathed.

Now, let’s compare shooters. The Canadian shooter was most likely diagnosably mentally ill, as are most perpetrators of similar crimes in the United States. The Canadian shooter had a highly charged agenda, as do most of his American counterparts. Most importantly, the Canadian shooter was perfectly happy to kill as many people as he saw necessary to make his point, a trait shared among mass murderers of all stripes.

The difference between them? The Canadian shooter carried out his attack with a single-shot hunting rifle, while most American killers with similar motives are armed with semi-automatic weapons. Put an assault rifle in the hands of our blue-robed friend, and the entire room of 50 or more people could easily have been wiped out. Instead, he managed three shots before being tackled, taking only a single life.

I’m not any more keen on a well-armed government and weaponless citizenry than most Americans who tout their right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, but there is simply no need for that right to extend to weapons created with nothing other than mass murder in mind.

Keep the handguns, ban the semi-automatic assault weapons – problem solved.